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The Most Haunting—And Most Inspiring—Moment in A Christmas Carol

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Around the world, authoritarians seem to be regaining their strength and daring. In the United States, a political coalition—one that includes people for whom, as my colleague Adam Serwer has memorably written, “the cruelty is the point”—is returning to power. It’s been a tough year for people who believe in liberal democracy. But during the Christmas season, let me make the case for a little faith in the resilience of goodness and justice—and how we can all learn something from Charles Dickens and one of his best-known works, A Christmas Carol.You don’t need to be a Christian to find solace in A Christmas Carol, because it’s not really a story about Christianity. It’s a story about one man’s bitterness, his regrets, and his repentance. More broadly, it’s about the joy that everyone can find by deciding to be a better person in a world that sometimes feels cold and overwhelming.The main character of the story is the legendary Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge, an obnoxious miser who delights in his sneering misanthropy. (Many wonderful actors have played Scrooge in various adaptations, but I especially revere George C. Scott in the 1984 television movie.) Scrooge is a mossy cistern of cold, sour inhumanity. His miserliness isn’t just about hoarding wealth for himself; it’s about the petty vengefulness he takes in denying money to others. When two men come to his office to ask for contributions to alleviate the suffering of the indigent, one of them tells Scrooge that poor people would rather die than go to the workhouses and other nightmarish institutions to which they are consigned. Scrooge responds with calm and undiluted contempt: “If they would rather die,” he says, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”I don’t want to overdraw comparisons to our current politics, but when political leaders are talking about creating mass detention camps in America, and voters—even those who were once undocumented immigrants themselves—approve of such ideas despite the danger to their own family, this kind of Victorian viciousness feels uncomfortably relevant.Back to Scrooge: What about the people who don’t want his money, the happy souls who are merely living their life and indulging in the joy of the season? Well, he hates them too. When Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, a good and gentle young man, asks his uncle why he deplores Christmas so much, Scrooge sneers: “If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” Scrooge, of course, will soon see the error of his ways. He will realize that despite attaining wealth and privilege, he is angry and unhappy because of a self-loathing that is mostly the result of his own choices. He will eventually beg forgiveness: Every year, I feel tears in my eyes when Scott, as Scrooge in the 1984 film, wipes the snow from an unloved stone in a barren graveyard, sees his own name, and pleads with the spectral Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come for a chance to change.The real hero of A Christmas Carol, however, is not Scrooge but his long-deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, whose presence in the story is brief but crucial. (He is, after all, mentioned in the famous first line: “Marley was dead: to begin with.”) Marley, in life a pinchpenny recluse like Scrooge, died seven years before the tale begins. When he comes to Scrooge as a frightening apparition on Christmas Eve, he is wrapped in a winding chain attached to now-useless ledgers and cash boxes. He laments to Scrooge that he is forever doomed to wander the Earth among the human beings he so assiduously ignored while making his money.Scrooge at first resists believing his own eyes, but he finally accepts that he’s talking with a damned soul. For Marley, it is too late, but he hopes to save Scrooge: “I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.” “You were always a good friend to me,” said Scrooge. Scrooge, however, doesn’t get it. He is confused by Marley’s damnation, because for him, material success is evidence of a virtuous life. (This is hardly a Victorian conceit: Think of how many people believe this right now.) When Scrooge tries to comfort the ghost, Marley will have none of it: “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” These last three lines chill me, yet encourage me.Scrooge’s repentance comes after years of a wasted life and a night of trauma and shame. The rest of us, however, don’t have to wait. Each of us, every day and in our own small way, can resolve right now that mankind is our business, that the common welfare is our business, and that charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence are all our business, no matter what we do to fill our days or put food on our table—and no matter whom we voted for.Americans can’t control much of what’s about to happen in their national politics. Some of the people about to govern the United States may be determined to be conscientious public servants, but others seem convinced that their fellow citizens are, to use the president-elect’s words, “vermin” and “scum.” These people will bring division to our public life. Responding in kind, or acquiescing, or withdrawing entirely and believing in nothing, will all be powerful temptations. Giving in to anger or despair is easier, of course, but such feelings are empty emotional calories that eventually leave people spiritually starved. We might hope that others will change their mind, but the sustainable path is to control what’s in our own heart.The graveyard scene in the 1984 production of A Christmas Carol was filmed in the town of Shrewsbury, England. The stone marker that Scott’s Scrooge discovers in the snow was left in place, and for 40 years, it’s been a tourist attraction.Last month, someone vandalized it, smashing it into pieces.For all I know, the culprits could have been local kids experiencing their first tangle with beer (and the stone has since been repaired), but I found the news dispiriting: It seemed like a perfect comment on our modern age of cynicism and avarice that someone trashed the place where Scrooge found his redemption. Learning of this vandalism was part of why I decided to write about A Christmas Carol today. As heartening as it is to think of Scrooge’s happy repentance, it reminded me that we are better served by heeding Marley’s words—so that we never find ourselves in the snow, staring at our own grave, and wondering whether we still have time to set things right.Related: The most unsettling Christmas Carol The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic. The Walmart effect Good on Paper: Are young men really becoming more sexist? The end of news Today’s News Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime, announced in a Telegram post that its leader has reached a deal with other rebel leaders in its coalition to dissolve all factions and merge them under the defense ministry. American Airlines resumed service this morning after a brief outage that grounded all planes. Residents along California’s coast are under high-surf and flooding threats, a day after a major storm. More From The Atlantic You are drinking the wrong eggnog Elizabeth Bruenig on Joe Biden’s moral wisdom Two different ways of understanding fatherhood The Space Telescope Advent Calendar Evening Read Illustration by Kyle Ellingson How to Not Fight With Your Family About PoliticsBy Elizabeth Harris My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican. Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode. What’s always impressed me about our big, mixed-up family is not just that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes several couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their own spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, much less for the same party, in years. Read the full article.Culture Break Joanne Joo Watch. The protagonists of Babygirl (in theaters) and Black Doves (streaming on Netflix) are stuck in their “perfect” lives—and find illicit fulfillment outside them, Sophie Gilbert writes.Listen. Check out our list of the 20 best podcasts of 2024.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Why Are My Neighbors Screaming at Me?

54 m

theatlantic.com

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.Dear James,I’m typically quiet and mind my own business. But in recent weeks, I’ve been having conflicts with people over minor things. Just today, I got yelled at twice. I’m not sure if it’s me or them or a phase of the moon.Early this morning, I was driving in my neighborhood. Visibility was poor because of the long shadows of winter morning. A man dressed in black crossed the street, and I didn’t see him at first. I did stop on time, but I felt an apology was in order, so I lowered my window and said I was sorry. He came over to the car, already screaming at me, and leaned in to continue screaming in my face.Then this afternoon, I took my dog to our neighborhood park. I often allow the dog some off-leash time, as many of my neighbors do. This time, my dog took off and ran into the yard of a house bordering the park. The house’s owner, who was outside, ran at the dog, yelling, using some choice words. I put the dog on leash, apologized, and quickly left.In both these instances, I was in the wrong. But I was surprised at the intensity of the reactions. Am I an asshole? Or is everyone about to blow a fuse? Or are these random occurrences, and I’m reading too much into them?Dear Reader,Excellent atmosphere in this letter. “The long shadows of winter morning”—right on. And the whole sense of transgression in the second episode, of instability and triggered boundaries: love it.You definitely don’t sound like an asshole. Assholes cannot write descriptive prose. (That may not actually be true. Good essay topic, though. “Assholes Cannot Write Descriptive Prose: Discuss.”) Also—and less controversially—an asshole has no concept of being in the wrong. Or he does, but he applies it only to the other guy. You, in contrast, are rather haunted by these incidents, and you worry about your role in them.The day you describe, with its yellings and its psychic abrasions, is the sort of day that can make an occultist out of you. You start thinking about astrology, tarot, vibes, telepathy, the underworld. I do anyway. Is some planet somewhere pulling in the wrong direction, like a truculent mule? Is the mass mind devolving? Am I unwittingly putting out some kind of freaky energy, to elicit this response?I relate deeply, for what it’s worth, to the dilemma of your rogue dog. My dog, Sonny, is a born crosser of lines and violator of spaces, and we have both been scolded, shamed, and exiled many times. On balance, I think it’s been good for me. (For him too, possibly, but Sonny—being a dog—keeps his counsel.)I’ve thought a lot about your question: Are these random occurrences? And my considered answer is: It doesn’t matter. Maybe you were a little off, tired, out of sorts. You drove distractedly for a second; your dog moved too fast for you. So what? No harm was done, and in both cases you apologized. Screw that shouty guy in the street, and screw that irritable homeowner and enemy of dogs. Leave them to their little rages and fist-shakings. Leave them to their blood pressure. Do not invest them with the mysterious power of augury.Raising a glass to rebel canines everywhere,JamesBy submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

How to Not Fight With Your Family About Politics

5 h

theatlantic.com

My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican.Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode. What’s always impressed me about our big, mixed-up family is not just that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes several couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their own spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, much less for the same party, in years.For a long time, those differences were mostly an annoyance that flared around elections, but over the past few years they’ve become far more stressful for those couples to navigate. Especially now, when the country is so divided and angry, when we have pulled so far into our own corners that it feels like the seams holding us together are finally about to snap. Yet all those couples are still together. I wondered how they did it.That question turned into a novel in part about a Democrat and his husband, a Republican who’s running for office. The book is not about politics or campaigns; it’s about marriage and ambition and what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t match how we see ourselves. But in order to write it, I needed to do some research. I could have watched hundreds of hours of Fox News and MSNBC and talked with dozens of strangers in the grocery store. Instead, I decided to talk with the people in my family—about guns, abortion, immigration, and climate change—whose politics I found baffling.[Faith Hill: What if you just skipped the holidays?]These are the conversations most of us spend the holidays desperately trying to avoid. I wasn’t particularly excited about having them either. But I figured it would at least be efficient, and I hoped that maybe I’d learn something.I’ve been a reporter at The New York Times for 15 years, so I have spent many hours of my life asking personal questions about sensitive issues. When I’m working on a story, my job is to figure out what the facts are and what they mean, and then I present the information so readers can decide for themselves. I’ve stopped countless people on the street or in parking lots over the years to ask about politicians or schools, how much they pay in rent, and what they think about ice-skating when it’s 78 degrees in February.The people I interview don’t generally ask me what I think about climate change, or whom I’m voting for, and if they did, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. My role as a reporter is to dig up information, not to convince anybody. (I can’t say what I think about those issues here, either; Times guidelines require that reporters keep their political views to themselves.) I’ve had hundreds of these conversations over the years, and I can’t think of a single interview that got combative, even when I personally disagreed with every word.So I decided to approach my family like a reporter. I wasn’t looking to have a back-and-forth; I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they thought and why.I started with my brother. He lives in Tampa, and sometimes we talk on the phone while he walks around the neighborhood with his dog, a Schnauzer-ish rescue who had a difficult puppyhood and sometimes wears a weighted vest when she gets anxious.We’ve always gotten along, but it had been a few years since we talked about politics in any real way. The last time had been at my parents’ dining-room table, where my mother tried desperately to change the subject while my brother and I shouted over our Chinese takeout. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I remember what that anger felt like, as though an animal was trying to claw its way out of my chest. I wanted to reach across the table and shake him. I could stay perfectly calm talking with strangers about their views; not everyone is going to agree with me, and that’s fine. But how could my own brother believe these things?When I called my brother to explain that I was working on a book and wanted to talk with him about politics, I told him I wasn’t interested in a debate: This was research, and I just needed to understand.“Okay,” he said. I pictured him walking under a palm tree with his little gray dog. “Shoot.”I began with some basics. If you were talking to a 5-year-old, I asked him, how would you explain what it means to be progressive? How would you explain being conservative to that same kid?I didn’t agree with his answers, but that didn’t matter. Some of my characters would. I asked him to keep going.Tell me about immigration, I said. What do you think is fair for kids who were brought here illegally when they were young?What do you think about affirmative action?What should be done about climate change?What about abortion?As he explained his views, I could feel myself getting to know my characters better. I could see their faces more clearly in my mind. And it was a good excuse to talk with my brother. We both have kids and jobs and marriages to attend to, and we don’t keep in touch as much as I wish we did. But suddenly we were calling more often, and I was enjoying it. Cautiously, I took another step. I would talk to my in-laws.On paper, my father-in-law and I could not be more different. I’m a gay, Jewish New Yorker, and he’s a pickup-driving farmer who lives in rural Kentucky. But we both love to read and we like to kid around, and over the 15 years since I met my wife, her father and I have become close. There have always been topics, however, we’ve had a hard time discussing. I remember one conversation years ago, when we spent nearly an hour late at night taking turns making “just one last point” about the accessibility of guns around the country. He was mystified by my perspective, and it took every drop of my willpower not to shout at him in his own house. My wife lasted only a few minutes before she got up from the table and left the room.His politics aren’t predictable, though. He does not, for example, own a gun. Instead, he likes to say that he keeps giant aerosol cans of wasp spray around the house in case of an intruder. And because there are wasps in the barn.A few months into writing my novel, my wife and I took our kids to Kentucky for a spring visit. As we sat in rocking chairs around the woodstove, I talked to my father-in-law about electric cars and renewable energy. I used the same approach I did with my brother. I listened. It was research. We didn’t worry about who was right. And the conversation was … perfectly pleasant! Really, it was a great success. It gave me more material for my book, and no one said anything they came to regret.So I tried two more members of the family. Sitting around a backyard bonfire in Louisville one evening, I talked with one of my sisters and her husband about how they vote. (Later, I would call this husband to ask about golf and what he would do if he found out his wife cheated on him with a woman.)[Olga Khazan: Why families fight during the holidays]On another visit to Kentucky, I stood with my mother-in-law in her kitchen, as a cluster of white and brown sheep milled around in the pasture out back. I asked her how it felt to be married to someone who voted differently than she did.She sighed, shook her head, and said she didn’t understand it. “But he’s such a kind person,” she said.When I tell people about my family, or about my novel, one thing I hear a lot is: If my spouse voted differently than I did, I’d get a divorce.Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn’t. Not all of these couples started out so far apart. But slowly, over time, their views shifted, like a shadow tilting in the afternoon sun, until there was almost no overlap remaining. But they continue to share the day-to-day stuff of their actual lives—kids, mortgages, jobs. They take care of each other. And if those things work, if you’re good to each other, would you really blow it all up?None of my family members was so persuaded by our conversations that they switched their party affiliation. But the more of these discussions we had, the easier they became. And for everyone involved, it got harder to dismiss the people on the other side, whose views we often see in caricature. My book is finished, but the way my family and I learned to talk with each other has stuck. We try to remember that, even when we despise each other’s leaders, we are all just people doing our best.

Desperate Housewives at Christmas

6 h

theatlantic.com

Maybe it’s the time of year, but I’ve been thinking lately about Nora, the whirling, frantic heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, overspending on Christmas presents, quietly operating her household in ways that go unseen, twisting herself into knots of gaiety and performance that can only unravel. Relationships can endure an awful lot, the play asserts, but not false intimacy—not the pretense of something that should be sacred. A Doll’s House also underscores how easy it is to get trapped playing a part, particularly one that’s lavishly rewarded.Romy (played by Nicole Kidman), the unexploded bombshell around whom the new film Babygirl is built, is one of Nora’s heirs. So is Helen (Keira Knightley), the grinning politician’s wife and dutiful mother of twins in the Netflix series Black Doves, who happens to be a spy operating under deep, deep cover. Both Babygirl and Black Doves are set at Christmastime, which allows me to argue that the former is the most honest kind of Christmas movie—not a cheerful fable about a rotund home invader, but a ferocious portrait of a woman balancing right on the edge. And like Black Doves and A Doll’s House, the movie homes in on someone who is simultaneously dying to blow up her “perfect” life and clawing to protect it at all costs.Since Halina Reijn’s movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival this summer, with Kidman claiming the Volpi Cup award for Best Actress, Babygirl has been provoking debate about its exploration of desire, deception, and power. Romy is the immaculately assembled and impossibly tense CEO of an automation company, whose pioneering work with robotics and artificial intelligence feels almost too on the nose. Romy is optimized, down to the subtle Botox shots that limit her expression and the high-femme power suits in dusky pink that register her as a compassionate girlboss. But is she human? As she attends her office holiday party, then her husband’s theatrical premiere (Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler), then her family’s Christmas dinner at their picture-perfect house outside New York City, Romy switches fluidly between different identities. None feels authentic, at least until a messy affair with the unsettling, slightly feral Samuel (Harris Dickinson) encourages her to try out a kind of role-play that’s wholly new.[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]Much has been made of Babygirl’s sex scenes, in which Samuel, who’s both disconcertingly fearless and bizarrely intuitive, senses that Romy wants someone to dominate her—not for humiliation and abjection, but as an expression of care. In the movie’s early moments, Romy straddles her husband, simulating orgasm, before rushing to her laptop to indulge in what really turns her on; she packs lunches for her two daughters wearing a rose-patterned apron, slipping in handwritten notes that will surely mortify them; she sits in her corner office, welcoming a new class of interns, Samuel among them. Each of these roles involves catering to others, but what Samuel understands is how much she longs to cede control, to abandon decision making, to be sternly told what to do. Reijn, who also wrote Babygirl, lightly suggests that Romy’s free-range childhood in a cult helps explain her eroticization of authority, but Romy’s craving for risk feels like more than that: It’s the only way she can critique her idealized existence. “There has to be danger,” she explains late in the movie, trying to understand what she really wants. “Things have to be at stake.” The push-pull between safety and survival is the movie’s most fascinating element. As Nora says to an old friend in A Doll’s House, faced with the possible airing of her secrets, “A wonderful thing is about to happen! … But also terrible, Kristine, and it just can’t happen, not for all the world.”Through this lens, Kidman’s performance as Romy lingers long after the final act; it’s a disturbing mix of reticence and abandon, taut composure and elemental surrender. The movie is part and parcel of Kidman’s series of works in which she embodies artifice before imploding it as we watch. As an actor, she, too, seems drawn to risk, and to the freedom and fulfilment that can come with acquiescing to another person’s creative vision. Before she was a director, Reijn was a classically trained actor, playing an “unkempt and suicidal” Hedda Gabler (as one profile put it), among other roles, before developing debilitating stage fright in her late 30s. What both she and Kidman seem to want to say with Romy is that no loneliness is more profound than realizing that you don’t know yourself at all—and that the comforts and milestones you once yearned for have become anchors that threaten to pull you under.Helen (not her real name), Knightley’s undercover operative on Black Doves, operates within much the same space as Romy and Nora: Her family is one enormous lie that she will fight to the death to maintain. The Netflix series, written by Joe Barton (the creator of the underrated crime thriller Giri/Haji), is a darkly funny, thrillingly brutal, ludicrously self-aware yarn about underground crime networks, diplomatic crises, and espionage. Like Babygirl, though, it’s also about human connection, and the untrammelled joy of being with the people who make you feel most yourself. Helen is a member of a private spy syndicate called the Black Doves, operated by an elegant woman known only as Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire). Unlike spies who serve their country, the Black Doves work for cash, selling secrets to the highest bidder. When Helen was recruited, it was because Reed sensed she was a thrill seeker with a flair for violence and a cool head in a crisis. For 10 years, “Helen” has been married to a Conservative member of Parliament who’s now the secretary of defense, bearing his children and stealing his files. In the first episode, we learn that (a) she’s been having an affair, seeking some release from the constraints of her fake day-to-day existence, and (b) her lover has been murdered, setting off a trail of bloody retribution and the near-constant threat of exposure. (The effort of maintaining her triple life, at one point, almost gets her killed when her daughter FaceTimes her while Helen is hiding from assassins.)Barton appears to enjoy juxtaposing the banality of Helen’s life as a wife and mother—flawlessly hosting her husband’s holiday work party, sticking jewels on a crown for a Nativity costume—with the extravagant action of her secret life. Helen has been styled (intentionally, it seems) to look just like Kate, Princess of Wales: hair in long, loose waves; dressed in an endless array of expensive sweaters; and smiling, smiling, smiling. In one scene, Reed describes Helen as “a coiled spring,” and the latter’s performance of holiday jollity is so committed that you can only faintly sense her cracking at the edges. When Helen finds herself in danger, Reed summons her former work partner, Sam (Ben Whishaw), and his pairing with Helen is, for me at least, what makes the show so fun. “Hello, darling,” Sam tells her, immediately after blowing the head off one of her assailants with a shotgun. Helen, covered in more blood than Carrie at prom, crumples in joy and gratitude. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she sighs.Black Doves is best appreciated if you don’t think too hard about the logical holes in the plot and simply enjoy the spectacle. But there’s also much more to Helen than one might expect from the genre: more sympathy for how suffocated she is by her sham marriage, her own perfect display of domesticity, her unexpectedly tender impulses as a mother, which ruin her ability to just do her job. The show’s most ruthless bosses are all women—Lancashire’s Reed, Kathryn Hunter as the wormily sinister director of a league of assassins, Tracey Ullman in a cameo I won’t spoil—which suggests that they’re all adept with secrets. For Helen, though, her fake life has become so dominant that it’s superseded her identity as a person in her own right. “I wake up sometimes and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, Sam, because I have no idea who I am,” she says in one scene. “And neither does anyone else.”[Read: The awful ferocity of midlife desire]In the end, Black Doves suggests that Helen, like Romy, might be better off at home, but that her fearlessness and risk-taking have shown her something about what she actually wants. Late in the series, confronted in a shop by an interloper who has tried to infiltrate her family, Helen throttles her with a pearl necklace—that loaded symbol of class and status—then lets her go, shrieking, “I’m still Helen Webb, and Helen Webb doesn’t stab girls to death in jewelry stores on Christmas Eve.” I laughed at the line, and at Knightley’s regal meltdown. But it also seems to signal that all of Helen’s adventures have led her to a better understanding of herself, and to acceptance. That shift is enabled by Sam, who really does see her, and—better—sees someone worth knowing. It’s the kind of validation that can make everything else about her life and her Christmas—the strategizing, the emotional regulation, the smiling—just that much easier to bear.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Joe Biden’s Moral Wisdom

The president has commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row to life without parole, a historic move.

20 h

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‘A Terrible Irony’: How the Media Lost Trust

And a template for rebuilding it

22 h

theatlantic.com

Matt Gaetz’s Winning Streak Is Over

23 h

theatlantic.com

The normal rules of public disgrace may no longer apply to Donald Trump. But at least some expectation of good behavior remains, it seems, for a politician in Trump’s orbit.After a multiyear investigation, the House Ethics Committee reported today that former Representative Matt Gaetz paid “tens of thousands of dollars” to various women, including one 17-year-old girl, “for sex and/or drugs” on at least 20 occasions. Many such allegations had been reported before but specific details are always more shocking to the senses, and the report was heavy on those.“The Committee received testimony that Victim A and Representative Gaetz had sex twice during the party, including at least once in the presence of other party attendees,” the panel said. “Victim A recalled receiving $400 in cash from Representative Gaetz that evening, which she understood to be payment for sex. At the time, she had just completed her junior year of high school.”In its conclusion, the committee said it had found evidence that Gaetz violated several House rules “prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”I reached out to Gaetz’s former congressional aides for his comment on the report, and they pointed to his long denial on X, now pinned to the top of his profile, which is full of all-caps disclaimers. “I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED,” he wrote. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”That life is already different from the one he’d carefully planned. A week after the November election, the 42-year-old Florida Republican was named as President-Elect Trump’s choice to lead the Justice Department. Gaetz quickly gave up his seat in Congress—to forestall, it was widely assumed, publication of the ethics committee’s report. But the maneuver seemed to have failed when, a month ago, he pulled out of the running for attorney general and announced the launch of a show on the relatively marginal One America News Network. As one former Republican lawmaker from Florida who’d collaborated with Gaetz in the House (and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly) described his former colleague’s future: “It’s oblivion.”A man who reportedly dreams of being Florida governor is now facing the blunt reality of his own political irrelevance. “He is farther from the governor’s mansion now than ever,” Peter Schorsch, a Florida publisher and former political consultant who previously worked with Gaetz, told me. “GOP voters are not going to go with the P. Diddy of Florida politics.”[Read: The potential backlash to Trump unbound]“Matt Gaetz is winning,” I wrote in my profile of the congressman back in April. “He has emerged as the heir of Trumpism. And he’s poised to run for governor in a state of nearly 23 million people.”Until very recently, Gaetz was winning. He had, in the past few years, become a MAGA folk hero for his commitment to posture and provocation—as well as a trusted confidant of Trump. He was able to exact revenge over his arch-nemesis, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. More than anything, though, Gaetz seemed relieved: He’d been released from a set of ruinous claims after the Justice Department, which had been investigating sex-crimes allegations against him, dropped its probe in 2023, reportedly because of witness-credibility problems.Already personally rich, Gaetz has only ever wanted one thing: relevance. And his path forward seemed obvious to anyone who’d ever known him. At the end of 2025, he would run for governor of his home state—and, given his relationship with Trump, he seemed likely to win the GOP primary. Serving two years at the helm of Trump’s Justice Department could help Gaetz in that quest; even if his nomination were to be blocked, he could campaign as a victim of the “deep state” and the GOP establishment.Yet all of Gaetz’s planning fell apart. After initially voting not to release the report, the ethics panel took a second, secret vote earlier this month in which all five Democrats on the panel, plus two of its Republicans, chose to make their findings public. This morning, Gaetz filed a restraining order against the House panel to halt the official release, accusing the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen.” That last-ditch effort failed.After standing down from consideration as attorney general, Gaetz was being wooed by Newsmax, a TV network owned by the Trump ally Christopher Ruddy, where Gaetz has previously guest-hosted. But with the unreleased ethics report still hanging over his head, Gaetz instead accepted a role anchoring a show on OANN, a significantly smaller and less influential network. “If it gets much worse, he’s gonna be on public access,” Schorsch said. Some observers I spoke with expect Gaetz to relocate to San Diego, where OANN is based, which is nearly 3,000 miles from the Trump White House—far enough that it might as well be Mars.Some in MAGA world have come to Gaetz’s defense: Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, said today on his War Room podcast that the ethics report is “a big nothingburger” and encouraged Gaetz to “go full Harper Valley PTA” by returning to Congress on January 3 to take the oath of office—which Gaetz could technically do, given that he was reelected to his seat in November. Bannon called OANN a “great little channel,” but said Gaetz could do better than being a talk-show host: “You’ve got enough crazy people like Tucker Carlson and myself yelling in microphones,” he said. “We need a man in the arena.”Gaetz has already mused about a plan for revenge that would force other House members to disclose their sexual-harassment settlements. “He’s lashing out because he knows it’s over,” the former Republican lawmaker from Florida told me.Trump has not seemed eager to jump to Gaetz’s defense. After Gaetz withdrew from the AG race, the president-elect posted on Truth Social the kind of message you might read in your high-school yearbook from a loose acquaintance: “Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!”In two years’ time, Gaetz might still run for Florida governor. But his chances of success have dwindled, allegation by toxic allegation. “Who knows” whether Gaetz will try to run, the former Republican legislator texted me. “This isn’t being MAGA or America first. This is being a disgrace.” Gaetz’s implosion has probably made it easier for Trump and his allies to begin consolidating their support behind a candidate in a crowded field. “I know the bar has been lowered for what is acceptable behavior out of our politicians, but Florida voters know a creep when they see one,” Schorsch said.Gaetz’s superpower has always been his ability to find the spotlight and stay stubbornly in it. Yet he will have a hard time accepting his ouster from the white-hot center of MAGA world during a new Trump administration and adjust to a new perch far outside the perimeter. At OANN, Gaetz could engineer a way to make himself relevant once again—transforming himself into a media personality with influence and reach. But for now at least, Gaetz’s winning streak is over.

2024: The Year in Volcanic Activity

Scenes from the wide variety of volcanic activity on Earth over the past year

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theatlantic.com

Fatherhood Doesn’t Have to Be a Private Endeavor

Recent entries into the literature of parenting offer very different visions of dadhood as part of a man’s personal, or public, life.

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theatlantic.com